Beneath a flat stretch of desert in eastern Nevada sits a mineral deposit so large that the company measuring it now speaks in trillions of dollars. The catch is that a good portion of the ground cannot be touched, because the same undisturbed lakebed that may hold a fortune in critical minerals is also the patch of earth NASA depends on to keep its satellites accurate.
The company behind the find is 3 Proton Lithium, a privately held explorer based in Carson City. Earlier this month it released an updated resource report for its Railroad Valley Minerals Project, and the figures were big enough to draw national notice. The report described 1.78 million tons of inferred tungsten, which the company says is more than five times the largest tungsten resource currently listed in the U.S. Tungsten is a hard, heat-resistant metal used in munitions, drilling tools, and aerospace parts, and the country has not mined it commercially since 2015.
Tungsten was the surprise, though not the whole of it. The same salt complex holds 31 million tons of measured lithium carbonate equivalent, a total that ranks among the largest lithium resources in North America. It also contains 533 million tons of measured potash and 87 million tons of measured borate. Taken together, 3PL puts the gross in-ground value of the four minerals at roughly $3.5 trillion, enough, by its own reckoning, to supply the U.S. for hundreds of years at current rates of use.
What lifts those numbers above mere curiosity is where the country now gets these materials. China controls most of the world’s tungsten supply, and in 2026 it tightened export limits on the metal. Prices responded sharply, climbing roughly 600% from early 2025. The U.S. also imports more than 90% of its potash and a large share of its boron. A single domestic basin that could cover all four is the sort of thing that gets noticed in Washington, which is part of why 3PL’s chairman and chief financial officer, Kevin Moore, has described the deposit as a national security story rather than a mining one.
Here is where the ground gets complicated. Roughly a third of 3PL’s claims fall inside land that the Bureau of Land Management withdrew from mining in 2023, a restriction covering close to 22,684 acres and meant to last twenty years. The reason is NASA. The agency uses the flat, unchanging surface of Railroad Valley to calibrate instruments aboard Earth-observing satellites, checking what those sensors report from orbit against carefully measured conditions on the ground. That work relies on the land staying exactly as it is, and NASA has said mining would interfere.
This is not the first time the two sides have met over the same dirt. A lithium deposit created a similar conflict in 2023, and NASA prevailed then, with the withdrawal effectively locking up part of the resource. The tungsten discovery has reopened the argument at higher stakes. 3PL maintains that its method, pumping mineral-rich brine from wells and processing it on small surface footprints of about 80 acres, would leave the lakebed largely undisturbed, sidestepping the open pits and waste rock of conventional mining. NASA remains unconvinced that any disturbance is worth the risk to a calibration record built over decades.
The company is trying to shift the outcome through Washington rather than through the courts alone. It holds a FAST-41 Transparency designation, a federal label intended to speed permitting for projects deemed strategically important, and it says it has been in contact with the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, and the Federal Permitting Council. Its case is that the 2023 restriction was drawn before anyone grasped how much lay beneath the surface, and that the math looks different now that tungsten is in the mix.
Whether that argument moves the federal government is still unsettled. Even if the restriction were lifted tomorrow, 3PL has acknowledged that production is at least five years off, and the headline tungsten figure remains an inferred estimate rather than a proven one. The story for now is a study in competing national interests: a desert that might ease American dependence on foreign minerals sitting directly atop a desert that helps keep the country’s satellites honest, with neither use willing to yield to the other.
